Red Bull
by Fish the Impaler
Summary: SatAM contest entry. Snively’s hovercraft crashes in the swamp with one prisoner on board. Then, things start to get weird. Rated T for grievous injury, strong language, Mobian Kyuss and associated chemicals.


(Copyright Act Admissions/Lanham Act Disclaimers. This piece infringes copyrights owned by Sega and DiC. It is not a product of Sega, DiC, or Archie Comics. All available rights are reserved.)

**Red Bull**

Snively woke to shadow and crimson emergency light. The hovercraft was on an incline down. The control stick was planted in fleshy bruise on his forehead and the five point harness threatened to forcibly retract his testicles.

"Check the prisoners," he squeaked, pounding at the buckle with his small fist. "Priority override; secure the prisoners, now!" he—

—squealed in terror as static arcs from the control panel lit the cockpit white. He looked and saw the sole swatbot recovered from the staging area, the spear lodged deeper than before the crash, smoking like a barbecue. "Oh shit shit shit—"

The buckle popped and he scrambled up into the rear of the ship, towards the hatch and secondary maintenance interface. Just next to the warped brig, the minute green display and tiny keyboard that he ideally never used were working.

"Primary out," he mumbled, fingers crowding each other, "cells one through three out, avionics out, nav out, weapons down, comms up, life support up, internals down—"

"Unh." How many prisoners? Given the wolf's fresh, wet head wound, just one: a huge red-furred kid with long, hooked bone horns, groaning on his side, motionless against the brig's electrified bars.

Motionless against electrified bars?

"_Shitshitshitshit—_" Cell four, reroute, cut power to . . .

"Unh." The skull rolled; a horn _thong_ed against a bar. "C'nchita, wha—" A deep brown eye opened. "_You_—unh—" Fingers fat as sausages seized the deformed bars.

Cut power to comms. Reroute. Internal systems. Lights, vid feeds—brig—

Metal _groaned_. "Son of an overlander whore," the bovine strained. "_rrrrrrghghhrrrrr . . . ._"

Execute.

"_rrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!_"

The discharge blew the bull back a few feet. His limp body rolled onto its front and stopped.

Snively wiped his scalp. The cabin was unpleasantly warm. The brig door wasn't helping. For one thing, its damaged bars kept sparking white in the red darkness, spitting little wisps of smoke.

For another, it was drawing power from the comm suite's distress beacon.

* * *

"Gah!" Snively cried, slamming the hatch fast. He ripped off his field hat and swatted wildly at his arms and legs. 

"So where are we?" yawned the bull. Young, twenty maybe. How he'd been in wolf country Snively would never know.

"Silence," the human grunted.

"Great Swamp, right?"

Snively turned up his long, long nose.

"_Smells_ like it," the bull sighed. "How long are we stuck?"

He returned to the keys. "Shut your snout and enjoy the delay in your enslavement while it lasts."

"Eh," he yawned again. "What you doing now?"

"Preparing a welcome for your cur friends, if any survived."

"Good idea. They might have, if they chased you off and winged your ride." The bull glanced at the dead wolf—he'd taken his vest off and draped it over the wolf's face—then found a spindly tiger mosquito in the acrid air and flicked it at Snively. It vaporized in a miniscule bolt of lightning between the bars. "My bag's on the floor there, can you hand it in?"

"_Wake up!_" screamed Snively, eyes hot. "I'm going to _roboticize _you, you stupid cow! You'll do _whatever I say_ and be _whatever I want_, and _you're not going to like it! Do you understand?_"

"I've got a book in there," the bull pointed.

Snively kicked the bag against the hatch. The bull lay back and blew a long breath through rounded lips.

So: how to fix the point defense laser? It was scrap, true, but tinkering was preferable to powering the emergency beacon. He'd radioed an approximate position during the crash; his uncle would find him soon enough.

And _then_, at least, there'd be close questions of survival.

He choked on a plume of smoke from the smoldering electrics. The scrubbers were overtaxed, but he wasn't about to vent the cabin full of insects.

Maybe there was a way to make the place more livable.

* * *

"Bingo," Snively grinned. Execute. The speakers crackled; he watched the brig. 

The bull opened one eye as a wolf longflute howled a long, reverberant note. Perhaps he thought it was the pack, outside. Then Fennec sang, smooth and menacing.

_You got a big head_

_Yeah you got a big head_

_Yeah your head's in the clouds_

_Your head it's a knockout it kills 'em dead_

_(BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOMBOOMBOOM—)_

"I hope you don't mind," Snively shouted over the jagged, unpredictable riffs of "Bullets Over The Rainbow," smiling evilly. "I found some fragmented files on the drives."

"_What?_"

"Music!"

_Your head it's brutal_

_Your mouth it spits out guns_

_Your guns we shoot_

_We are your chosen ones_

_(BOOM, BOOM, BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM—)_

"What is it?"

"They're called Black Greenwater. I'm so sorry if it's not to your taste—"

"S'allright," mused the bull. "Guy over from Acorn's bunch talks about 'em."

"Oh," he said, crestfallen.

"Psyrock. It's not really you"

"Hmph. It's very precise music. Ordered and quite intricate when one chooses to pay attention."

"Who's the singer? Ben Fennec?"

"Brian Fennec," Snively corrected. "He works in a titanium refinery in Southeast Quadrant."

The bull rolled his eyes. "Huh."

Snively frowned and then smiled. "Soon you'll be living the life of a rock star, twenty-four hours a day!"

Shrug. "Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not."

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

He stayed quiet.

"In twenty-four hours you'll be the product of _my_ labor," Snively sneered. "Put that in your pipe and smoke it."

He ground his teeth as he stomped away.

* * *

What was _wrong_ with him? 

"Roboticization hurts," Snively insisted loudly, sucking on chocolate from the uncle-sized emergency rations. His unbuttoned green uniform aired a sweat-dark undershirt, red but true white whenever a spark strobed from the bars or the forward console. "Subjects experience inconceivable—"

"Yeah, for like, ten seconds? Then it's all just, beep, beep, yes Lord Fatass, certainly Master Nostrilhair."

"You don't _sleep_," Snively yawned. The sun was down outside, it would be past his bedtime in a couple of hours. "No dreams. Everything you know is working for us."

"Whatever. Way I figure it, machines don't get old, right? That's cool. Beats fieldwork."

Unbelievable. "Workerbot losses aside, you missed the _eternal slavery _part—"

"Eternal schmeternal. They'll deroboticize me. I'll pick up right where I left off."

"Acorn could lose—she _will!_ Where do you get off?"

"To hell with that reactionary bitch," the bull scoffed.

"What?"

"We can't lose. All predetermined."

Snively just stared, mouth open.

"Hand me my bag," the bull waved.

Snively eyed it curiously, crawled over and opened it.

"The red book—"

"Say!" interrupted Snively, pulling forth a long clay tube covered in swirling blue glazing.

The bull cringed. "That stuff's for a ceremony of—"

"Of course it is, my boy," said Snively, digging for matches in the emergency kit. "You were saying?"

"Robotnik has to lose; it's a historical economic necessity. He's doomed himself by creating the largest possible oppressed underclass. It's the last world-historical stage—"

Snively guffawed. "You're a _communist?_"

* * *

_I flick the lighter, grows a yellow mane_

_Makes the water smoke into flame, and there's a_

_NO FUTURE_

_NO FUTURE_

_STONES-OF-TIME_

_FLOAT-ING-_CIT_-TY . . . ._

"Oh, nonsense" coughed Snively, putting the clay tube down, bobbing his head slightly with the grinding guitar. The air was opaque with wreathes of dark and lighter gray smoke, thrown into relief by the frequent, irregular white strobes.

The bull nodded hopefully at the tube. "Could I—'

"No. Really, I'm embarrassed for you. It's painful to see an unreconstructed communist in this day and age."

"It's math. World revolution—"

"Don't talk to _me _about mathematics. It's an _empirical_ prediction, and it's _wrong_. But even doctrinally—let me look . . . ." He thumbed through the kid's ratty copy of the _3048 Industrial Reform Committee Minority Report_.

"What do you think's happening _right now_, overlander? It's everyone versus the last capitalist. The underclass can't get any bigger. Nationalism is gone, racism is gone; no one's stupid enough to think they're anything but slaves. Ideology is dead."

"We don't need—! One second." Snively grabbed the clay tube and took another hit. Stuff came on slow. "It doesn't matter what you _think_. Roboticized vermin work; period. The roboticizer _is _ideology."

"No," snorted the bull. "The roboticizer's capital."

"Intellectual capital, you dunce," laughed Snively, punctuating it with a hacking cough. "And you're raw materials."

"Labor—"

"And after roboticization, capital." Snively snorted and wiped his nose. "Try to make sure your categories apply to the world now that we've had our way with it. I know you're just a boy with some book you found, but please, try to _think_."

"Screw you," the bull spat.

Snively smiled. "You know what's more?" Snively asked.

The bull stared.

"You're adopted." He cleared his throat wetly. "I'm sick of economics. Let's discuss something else, you dumb ox."

"Like what," he sighed.

"I don't know. Number theory. No, topology." Snively forked his fingers at his eyes. "Have you ever tried LSD?"

The bull blinked. "What?"

"Wait, I'll be back." He needed more water. And though he'd checked, there just _had_ to be beer in the emergency rations.

* * *

"This," said Snively. 

The bull woke up. "Huh?"

Snively nodded, but he might not have moved his head. "This pipe." He ran his eye along it. "Who made?"

The bull's lips opened and Snively's ribcage crumpled to a point as the distorted, concussive waves of the scream flew from the beast's maw.

No, wait. That was the _music_.

"Oh thank gods." Snively shakily mopped some of the cool sweat from his lips.

"What?" asked the bull.

"Who?"

"Shut up," he whined. He rolled away from Snively, sniveling. "Shut up,' he choked, beginning to glisten at the corners of his eyes. "K—kthcc—Kuh—Concheetaaah . . . ."

"Quiet," breathed Snively, eye snagged on the sharp, twisted corner of one of the tube's hooklike shapes, the thick fog of smoke and guitar roaring through the gaps. "Be quiet," he whispered loudly.

"_Conchita._" Wet sniffle. Laughter in the throat. "_Conchita!_"

"_SHUT UP YOUR CRYING ITS FREAKING ME OUT!_" Snively squealed, eyes straining at the picture.

"Nuh—never see her aguh—gain. Beautiful black fur—"

"Oh . . . ." In the prisoner loading. When the hunting party returned, surprised him. _That_ wolf. That one got a

_HOLE-IN-HER-CHEST, _Brian Fennec screamed through distortion, abnormal geometry, raw chaos. _HOLE-IN-HER-CHEST, A FAT MONKEY, MONEY—_

And then he _saw_—

"_Tree!_" he cried.

"Wuh—_sniffle_—what?"

Snively slumped, stroking the pipe with his fingertips. "Tree," he muttered. "She wears a hat."

He slowly, carefully extended a single finger to touch the rhombus balanced just above the mouth.

"A hat of _diamonds_ . . . ."

_PSSHHANK—_

Swatbot head in the sudden light. "CHIEF ENGINEER SNIVELY SECURED. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED."

"Hull breach!" Snively screamed, scrambling to hold on to something. "Negative pressure! Hull breach!"

The bot grabbed him before he reached the electrified bars.

* * *

His uncle was speaking to him; inattention was called for. Word stew. Growl broth with little chunks of _pathetic, incompetent_, _unbelievable,__infuriating, appalling, inexcusable_, _regressive_. 

Regressive?

"—as if you'd returned that depraved, undisciplined infantry unit you left to become my attaché. To that deafening concrete bunker from which I rescued you! Or even that infested rathole your _stoner_ colleagues called a mathematics dorm!"

"I beg your pardon, sir."

"As though no time had passed. I would've hoped your tastes would improve under my tutelage."

"Does it really matter, sir?"

"Every aspect of you matters to me, Snively. You're the only human capital I have. Now back to work."

"What was that, sir?"

"Back to work."


End file.
